Paint By Number Fun: Winnie’s Picks

One of the perks of running a site like this one is that I often get contacted by cool companies offering me to try their products. More often then not I will agree to do so. It is fun! This time, Winnie’s Picks reached out to me and asked if I would like to try one of their custom Paint By Numbers. Of course I would! It was quite an experience. Fun, relaxing, and oh so very detailed. 🙂 Full Disclaimer: While, I do, sometimes have affiliate product links, in this case, Winnie’s Picks kindly sent me a custom paint by number so that I can blog about it here. This Paint By Number Fun was brought to you by Winnie’s Picks.

You can check out Winnie’s Picks website here.

Now, back to the painting.

It took me some time to figure out which photo I should send. Turned out that some of my photos wouldn’t make good paint by number paintings because they have large areas of single color and that is just not fun. After a bit of back and forth we settled on this photo of a blue jay I took in the spring. I have to say, I am rather proud of this photo: blue jays are fast and a little mean, so getting it on a photo in the pretty spring flowers of my crab apple tree was quite and achievement.

Here is the photo:

I came home one day to find a colorful tube in the mail from Winnie’s Picks. When I opened it, here is what I found inside:

The first thing I noticed that the canvas (and yes, it is an actual canvas) is not stretched. Since I don’t stretch my own canvases quite yet, I decided to do a small short cut. I traced, and cut with an X-acto knife a heavy duty cardboard of matching size, and then just stretched the canvas over that. Here is what it looked like:

Now, I could get to painting. Inside the package there were three brushes: flat, and two round small ones. I hardly used the flat brush, but a lot of the tiniest one. There were also 24 tiny containers of different colors. At first, I was a bit concerned that the containers are not enough paint, but turned out that I even had some paint left over. Another word of advice: make sure you close each container after use, and store them in a zip-lock bag.

Here is the paint by numbers all stretched out. My mind couldn’t comprehend how this would look like the photo when finished. Off I went painting.

Here it is after about two weeks of progress. It took me about 4 weeks to finish, but I only have bits of time here and there. I found it easier to focus on a section at a time, like top left corner, and then move on to the next spot, etc. It was fun, relaxing and ADDICTING. It was extremely satisfying seeing it all come together looking exactly how it was supposed to look.

Here is the painting all finished. I could not believe how close it was to the photograph.

Another few words of advice! The original shipment came with a little paper map with the paint by numbers printed on it. Don’t throw that out! I had to reference it several times when I painted the area with the wrong color. Also, a magnifying glass was helpful for the really tiny areas. Lastly, don’t stress out about going over the line occasionally, and getting the wrong color. This is supposed to be relaxing!

I was amazed at how close to a photo it came out. It was a completely different process than if I sat down and created the painting from the photo on my own. It also taught me a surprising lesson about picking colors for the painting.

You also might like some of our coloring pages!